Rahsaan Roland Kirk released an album in 1973 titled Prepare Thyself to Deal with a Miracle.
It features a live 21 minute saxaphone solo. When you listen to it, it's impossible to discern when the man took a breath. Incredible.

We are in the process of transitioning sections of Attensa.com to the MoveableType platform. Yesterday our crack web team showed me MoveableType Enterprise in action working on our servers. We're starting with the news section so that loading news releases, updating our news coverage and event schedule will be as easy as posting to this Typepad blog and there will be a feed for each section. I'll be working with this miracle. Incredible.

As part of Attensa's Project Dogfood we've been using BaseCamp and Central Desktop to manage projects and collaborate with partners. These tools definitely makes working with a distributed team easier. Both of these collaboration tools feature: milestones, to-do lists, file storage, messaging and Web feeds.

Apparently we aren't alone in experiencing the communication and collaboration benefits.

Benchmark Research recently completed a
sponsored research study looking at the returns from the use of collaboration
technology in the construction industry.

98% of collaboration technology users felt they
benefited from having information held centrally

93% of users said there was less chance of losing important documents

90% said it was easier to find and retrieve their documents.

I'd add, getting project updates in a Web feed makes it easier to stay on top of progress.

Gartner sees collective intelligence as the most important trend coming from the application of Web 2.0 technologies to solve business problems.

Here's the Gartner definition:

collective intelligence: an approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost effective way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

"That might be because Web 2.0 offers a sort of inverted way of looking at the way we do things now. Web 2.0 frequently embodies the emergent and freeform instead of the predefined and structured. It's often bottom-up instead of command-and-control. It's self-service instead of being mediated."

Both the Gartner report and Dion's analysis make the point that companies who have a clear vision and plan for putting social networking to work behind the firewall will have a clear competitive advantage.

Apparently the Attensa toolbars we introduced more than a year ago for tagging, identifying, previewing and subscribing to feeds and our tagging toolbar are pretty good ideas.

Newsgator just announced a beta of their toolbar today.

With the Attensa browser toolbar you can:

- identify all of the feeds available on a page- preview the feed and articles to see if you want to subscribe- subscribe with a click- access all of your feeds and articles in your browser- tag articles and synchronize with del.icio.us

The Chiclet problem surfaces at the Syndicator Blog. The rash of badges is totally out of hand.

Attensa has another approach to finding feeds and easily subscribing from a Web page or blog from your browser.

We use a toolbar in IE or Firefox to identify feeds and to let you see what kinds of articles are available before deciding to subscribe. This eliminates the need to clutter a page with branded badges. On the one hand this may not be the brightest marketing move on Attensa's part... but it sure makes sense from a user's perspective.

Michael Arrington has created a phenomenon building his TechCrunch readership to 80 thousand in less than a year. Impressive.

Attensa's history with TechCrunch goes back to our launch last summer. Last Thursday we sat down with Marshall Kirkpatrick who recently joined the TechCrunch team. Marshall just moved to Portland and we were delighted connect and bring him up to date on our products and progress and talk about all things related to RSS, social networking, Web 2.0 business and where he should eat and drink now that he's here. We even offered to help him.

Marshall got right on it and posted on the Attensa Feed Server and Attensa for Outlook 1.5 on Saturday. We really liked this line..."Attensa’s use of attention data in both its Attensa for Outlook and
Attensa Feedserver products is impressive now and the potential for the
future is really exciting. Just about any source of information can be
delivered by RSS and as the practice becomes more common we’re going to
need more sophisticated ways to take advantage of the medium." You can read the rest of "Attensa Offers Two Rich Enterprise Products here."

I'm the head of Customer Service at Attensa. The other day, my boss (you know, that Scott guy) wandered into my office and told me to blog.

OK.

I get pretty busy testing things and logging issues, but every day I hear and read and discover things about Attensa for Outlook that make me love my job. So, I can blog. Here we go...

I used to build catalogs of bookmarks. My bookmark file has travelled from computer to computer as I've upgraded my home office over the years, becoming ever more bloated and less organized. I'm a messy person. I have stacks of papers and kids toys and art projects living on my desk. I will never take the time to open my bookmarks file and clean it up properly... the best I can do is make a half-hearted attempt to purge broken website links once in a while.

Then along came tagging... wow! My life has suddenly changed!

I love tags. As I work through my feeds in Attensa for Outlook, I can tag articles on the fly to use later.... and the cool thing is, I get to make up my own tags (keywords) that work for my brain. When I'm working through my various projects and I need to put my hands on information quick, finding a web page in my catalog is as simple as pulling down the Attensa Tags menu and looking under the most logical keyword. No more hunting under bookmark sub-folders looking for a bookmarked site. With tagging, I don't lose web pages anymore. I use my del.icio.us account with Attensa so I have access to my tagged items from any computer.

Tip:Attensa's River of News has its own tagging button, on the article toolbar, making it really easy to save that article for later. When you tag the article, a link to the web page itself is created in your tags, not a link to the article in Outlook.

There's a project at Attensa called Project Dogfood. We've set up internal wikis and blogs to help us track fast moving projects, collaborate a little more cleanly and to give everyone on the team experience applying Enterprise 2.0 tools to our real world programs and projects.

Part of the motivation for Project Dogfood comes from our work with Six Apart. After sitting through three Business Blogging seminars, you can't help get caught up in Anil Dash's enthusiasm and wanting to apply the practical pointers on approaching business blogs that flow from DL Byron.

As part of Project Dogfood, I wanted to get more people involved in telling the Attensa story. I'd like to introduce Michelle, our customer service lead and author of the Flog Blog posts. I've asked Michelle to share her knowledge of Attensa for Outlook to help people get more out of the 1.5 beta.

We'll be sharing more about our learnings from Project Dogfood as soon as I flog the next victim into blogging.

David Utter has written a thorough overview of the Attensa Feed Server for WebProNews. His take - "A savvy company that steps up today for the Feed Server will be running ahead of the curve in the business world. Used effectively, the beneficial information a quality site can provide rapidly over a feed can help competitiveness in the marketplace."